Tag: New feature

We’ve been asked for G Suite integration a lot recently and today we can finally announce that, in collaboration with Google, MyBib is now available on the G Suite Marketplace. If you’re a school that uses G Suite, Google Apps, or Google SSO (single sign-on) you can now add MyBib to your Google Apps domain. This adds a direct login button to the apps menu for all the students in your domain, and allows them to tie their MyBib account with their Google account.

Aside from the convenience of having a quick and easy way to launch MyBib, it also ensures that your student’s citations will be saved on their Google school account, eliminating the risk of losing work if they forget to login. And in the future we’ll be adding a direct integration to Google Docs so that citations can be managed, inserted, and updated automatically from within their papers. In short: everyone’s lives are easier!

Bibliographies are most often associated with academic papers, but academic papers aren’t the only medium where information is cited. In fact, most of the information that we pass on day-to-day usually comes from somewhere else. And just like when we write academically, it’s also good practice to cite the sources of the information we share in order to back up our claims and statements.

Worldometers estimates that over 5 million blog posts are written every day. Marketingprofs puts the number at around 2 million, although that was four years ago. Either way, a lot of information is constantly being pushed out, and in the era of fake news it’s more important than ever to make it clear where that information originated from. That’s why, here at MyBib HQ, we’ve been working on a way to embed bibliographies and reference lists created with MyBib directly in a webpage, like a blog or learning management system.

We’ve added a new option to the Download menu: Link. This option will provide you with a short snippet of HTML code that you can insert into your blog or website article. Wherever you put it will make a cool button appear that loads your entire source list onto the page when clicked. It remains connected to your MyBib project too, so changes you make are updated when the button is next clicked.

Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for authors of digital articles to link to the sources they’ve referred to in their articles. Please let us know what you think, and fire over any ideas to help us improve it further.

We’ve included an example just below! (but note: if you’re reading this in the ‘What’s new’ popup box please click through to the main article first or it won’t work)

January’s almost behind us, and we’ve just added another hot new feature to MyBib. Building a bibliography with a group can be tedious (not to mention lonely 😛). Group members are throwing sources and updates at you from every direction, and it falls on your shoulders to make sure they’re all cited — and correctly too. That’s a pressure you could do without.

We have the solution — we’ve added a way for your group members to securely access one of your bibliographies from their own computer so they can make changes without you.

To enable access to your bibliography, first click the new Share button and turn on Sharing, then send the special link to each of your group members. They just need to visit the link and presto — they’re in! You still keep overall control of your bibliogaphy and can remove them if you need to, plus you’ll get live alerts every time they make a change.

Give it a try, and we’d love to know what you think. You can give us feedback using the speech bubble icon in the bottom-left corner of the tool.

It’s almost 2019 and we’ve got some big improvements on the way (spoiler: notecards is one of them). For now though, here’s a couple of smaller updates.

First up, be prepared to see helpful tips when entering data for each citation. These include pointers for finding specific pieces of information, and examples of the data you should be entering. We’ve also included some warnings to make sure you’re capitalizing words that should be capitalized, and lowercasing those that shouldn’t.

We’ve added a couple of quality improvements too — you can now select multiple citations and then drag them to other projects, or delete them all in a single click.

We’ve just added a live preview to each citation form. Now, when adding or editing a citation you can immediately see how it will be formatted before saving it.

This is especially useful for learning how adding or removing a piece of data can affect the citation as a whole. For example: when citing a webpage in MLA format where a website name hasn’t been added, the article title is italicized. However once a website name has been added the article title returns to normal but is surrounded with quotation marks instead, while the website name becomes italic in its place. That’s a significant change, and easily mistaken too.

In the future we want to add more useful features like this that help to explain the hows and whys of the citation process instead of automating it blindly. When we can present a learning opportunity alongside the automation then everyone wins.